Unholy Torment

by Kristie Cook

  “They’ve sent their most powerful mages here while their vamps and shifters are attacking the norms.”

  I skipped to a new mind signature, and as soon as I tried to latch onto the thoughts, intense pain seared through my eyeball and into my brain as though a nail had been driven into it. I clutched at my head, doubling over. I squeezed my eyes closed and concentrated on pushing the pain out.

  “Lex, what’s wrong?” Tristan’s large hand landed on my back and tried to soothe me.

  My head tilted, and my jaw clenched until finally, the agony dulled.

  “They have a . . . sorcerer . . . and a sorceress with them.” I tried to breathe through the lingering pain and finally managed to open my eyes to find Tristan and Vanessa hovering over me. “Kali must have taught them how to block me from their minds. Shit, that hurt.”

  Tristan reached out and wiped his thumb over my upper lip. It came away bloody.

  “They haven’t been involved in the attack, though. Yet,” I added.

  “They’re just wearing us down right now,” Vanessa said.

  Avoiding the sorcerers, I took my injured mind to one belonging to a warlock to study her thoughts further and nodded. They’d already figured out the north end of the island had been deserted, so they gave up on their attack up there, and the explosions stopped. But they weren’t giving up for good. They were only regrouping.

  “They’re getting ready to hit us with their heavy guns,” I confirmed, and I opened my mind to those of the entire island. Everyone take cover! It’s not over!

  People shrieked and ran into the streets before flashing away, hopefully gathering together under the protection of our weaker mages, which was protocol in the event of an attack. Many of the witches and wizards of the village may only be able to shield their homes or a single room, but that was better than nothing if our main defense collapsed.

  “Sorcerers?” Owen asked me.

  A sorcerer and a sorceress, I told him and Char. Can you hold them?

  “We will for as long as we can,” Char said. “But Owen needs to get down there to protect you and Tristan.”

  Before I could argue, a succession of bright yellow and orange lights shot across the water and blasted into our shield, breaching it almost immediately. The next spell hit our watchtower right behind the council hall, blowing it into pieces. The very tower where our mages powered the shield. Owen appeared next to me at the same moment and immediately threw a bubble over Tristan, Dorian, and me.

  “Come on,” Tristan said, pulling Dorian back into his arms.

  He flashed, and I followed his trail with Owen and Vanessa right on mine. We appeared inside the dungeons under the council hall, where they’d once jailed Tristan when he’d been accused of betraying the Amadis. I called the others to come join us, but Blossom, Jax, and Sheree refused to leave the injured behind.

  “I have a shield on them,” Blossom assured me. “You just stay safe, Alexis.”

  Char didn’t answer me, and I couldn’t locate her mind signature in the chaos, but she’d been in the tower with the other mages when the Daemoni had hit it. My heart wobbled, but I refused to believe she was dead. I couldn’t handle another death so soon, especially hers. I glanced at Owen, and his face remained stoic. He refused to believe, too.

  I sat against the cold, stone wall of one of the cells, closed my eyes, and used my mind to peek into others’ heads until I found a vampire who peered outside from his window. Now that the main shield had collapsed, the sorcerer and sorceress seemed to have backed off. In fact, magic spells no longer rained down on the town. Only a few random shots came, as though they were double-checking that the shield had actually fallen.

  I heard, “It’s a go,” from one of them before they all disappeared, only to reappear several miles away, nearly out of my mind’s reach.

  “What are they doing?” I asked aloud, not about to give the all clear to the island yet. Something was up. Then I heard the planes in the distance, quickly approaching—with no mind signatures inside of them. Were they drones? The answer to my question came a moment later when the bombs began dropping. On Amadis Island.

  “We can stop them,” Tristan said after several bombs hit the town with loud explosions, shaking the ground beneath us. Dirt fell from the ceiling and walls.

  Owen’s sapphire-blue eyes squinted. “It’ll take a minute to power up the shield.”

  “I meant we.” Tristan looked at me, and I nodded.

  “Stay here,” I ordered Vanessa and Dorian.

  Tristan, Owen, and I flashed outside, and we all raised our palms to the sky as more planes flew overhead and more bombs fell. We used our powers to stop three from slamming into the village and turned them toward the sea. But we’d barely rerouted them when more came. It took almost every ounce of energy I had to keep them from hitting the island. Then finally, they began to ricochet in midair like the spells had done earlier.

  “We can shield against those!” Charlotte whooped into my mind, and I let out the air I’d held trapped in my lungs at the sound of her “voice.”

  Owen joined his mother and the other mages who’d survived, and they strengthened the shield over the town. Unable to hit us anymore, the jets banked away and flew off. Dozens of columns of black smoke rose into the air from the main street in town and more in the residential district. My stomach sank at the thought of Amadis lives lost. I felt the grief spreading from people’s minds at the heartache right before them, but we still hadn’t given them the all clear to come out from their shelters.

  “Take cover, Alexis,” Owen said. “We don’t know if they’re gone for good.”

  Tristan took my hand and flashed us back to the dungeons.

  “Is it over?” Vanessa asked.

  “Can I go back to my room?” Dorian demanded.

  “We don’t know yet,” I said, and I gave Dorian the mom-eye for his rudeness. “And you can go back when we say you can go back.”

  He rolled his eyes and diverted his attention to Sasha, who had shrunk some, but remained alert.

  We sat in the cold, dank cell for hours. The Daemoni mind signatures hadn’t slipped completely out of range—they remained close enough for me to feel them, but not close enough to hear their thoughts and plans. I wouldn’t give the green light to my people until I knew we were safe.

  “Alexis,” Charlotte mind-spoke to me from where she and the other mages continued powering the shield from the main room above us. “Chandra just called. She’s been trying to reach you. One of her villages in India has been bombed, too.”

  My stomach sank. A little while later, another, similar report came in on Char’s phone, this one from Jelani in Africa. One by one, Rina’s council members checked in, delivering the same news over and over. The Daemoni, using the norms, had bombed dozens of our villages and colonies around the world.

  And I couldn’t do anything about it. I was stuck here in the dungeons, but even if I weren’t, what could I have done? The attacks had stopped hours ago, so all I could do now was to tell them to stay undercover and keep safe.

  “I feel like I’m telling everyone to just squat down like sitting ducks, when we should be fighting back. What kind of leader am I?”

  “You’ve told them exactly what Rina would have,” Tristan said, trying to assure me. But it only irked me.

  I shook my head as I paced the cell. “No. We have to do more. We won’t survive if we’re always on the defensive. We’re stronger than this. We have to fight back.”

  Finally, the Daemoni mind signatures retreated completely, and after having Owen return the shield to cover the entire island, I gave the all clear. We popped outside, and my heart dropped at the sight.

  In contrast to the stunning sunset on the water, the destruction was heartrending.

  The main street from the council hall to the pier at the other end housed the business district. Most of the village’s suppliers of goods and services lined the cobblestone street, and those buildings closest to shore
had been completely annihilated—the only supplier of mage reagents on the island, the Blood Bank where we donated blood for our vamps, and one of the three pubs. Other structures, like the blacksmith shop, had suffered major damage. Several homes had also, and two were destroyed altogether.

  We had three fatalities on the island, and I supposed we were lucky with such a small number, but my heart shrank at more losses and more funerals. Dozens of people had been injured, several badly. Fortunately, most of them could heal themselves, and the mages who couldn’t drank a healing potion made from vampire blood. It wasn’t perfect and didn’t completely eliminate their pain, but it helped speed the healing process.

  Owen, Charlotte, and the rest of the mages did their best to put homes and businesses back together, but some parts had been completely disintegrated or burnt to ashes and others damaged beyond repair, returning none of the structures to how they’d been before the attack. We had to make the decision to destroy two more business buildings and three homes—one of them Char’s—because they weren’t safe for anyone to be near. She’d been able to retrieve some of her belongings, but most everything she’d owned had been destroyed by fire from the bombs.

  As everyone came together to help each other, I fielded calls from around the world. The Amadis had lost hundreds of people. The Daemoni had flattened entire villages. Each casualty report felt like a punch to my stomach, leaving me breathless and my body trembling.

  Not until the quiet hours between midnight and dawn were we able to return to the matriarch’s mansion to assess the damage there. My stomach knotted itself once we decided our people were taken care of and we could go. I feared the extent of the destruction of the beautiful marble and stone structure that had been here for millennia. We didn’t know its true age because it had already been standing when Cassandra found it over two thousand years ago, as if waiting for her discovery. If Charlotte’s house hadn’t just been demolished, I would have suggested we stayed there for the night so we could see the bad news in the light of morning. Not that the darkness would affect our vision. It just seemed that the sight we would see would be more dreadful in the night.

  My breath caught when we appeared in front of it.

  Chapter 3

  “Wow,” I breathed. “It’s completely fine.”

  At least, the matriarch’s mansion appeared to be intact and unharmed from the outside. Several ancient cypress trees had been destroyed around the building, huge craters were left in the ground right next to the foundation, and bomb shrapnel was scattered over the earth. The nearby training gym had been obliterated to no more than a pile of broken stone. But the mansion itself stood in all its splendor, entirely unscathed.

  “It’s protected by the Angels,” Ophelia said matter-of-factly. The centuries-old witch had just appeared right next to me, startling me. She gave me a smile, her face crinkling under the deep creases lining her skin, and then she bustled inside, ready to get back to work. If the children in the village hadn’t needed her care and cooking so badly, she likely would have been here hours ago. Once she disappeared into the dark foyer, her voice carried out to us. “Oh, dear.”

  Since everyone on my team except Char had been staying at the mansion, they’d all come back with Tristan, Dorian, and me. Char did, too, needing a place to stay. We hurried inside after Ophelia, who continued moving throughout the first floor, sighing and repeating, “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”

  Although the exterior hadn’t so much as a scratch, the interior proved to be a bit of a different story. Shards of glass and various broken items littered the floors of every room—vases, lanterns, pictures, books, and antique knickknacks that had fallen from their places on shelves and the walls. A few pieces of smaller and lighter furniture lay on their sides. When Mom and I had lived in California many years ago, we’d survived a bad earthquake. The impact of the bombs right outside had caused similar damage inside the mansion.

  “What a mess,” Ophelia said as she traveled through the dining room where we all stood, waving her hand and putting things back right. “Easy enough to fix, though.”

  Blossom, Charlotte, and Owen helped her make the repairs while Tristan and I followed Dorian upstairs to his room. He was about to slam the door when Tristan caught it.

  “Next time I say to do something, don’t ignore me and don’t argue with me,” I said to Dorian as Tristan and I stood in his doorway. I’d waited to discipline him until we were in private, but he still scowled at us.

  “I don’t like you in my head like that,” he answered, his tone not too kind as he watched his toe scuffing at the stone floor.

  “Well, too bad. It works, and it’s a lot faster than a cell phone.”

  “It’s weird.”

  “Everything’s weird about our life, but that’s what it is—our life. Deal with it.”

  He looked up at me through his lashes and sneered. “Why are you on my case?”

  “Because you need to listen to your mother when she calls you,” Tristan said.

  “You could have been killed,” I added.

  He rolled his eyes. “I came, didn’t I?”

  “Watch your tone, young man,” Tristan warned.

  “Don’t talk to me like that,” I said at the same time. “And don’t roll your eyes at us!”

  Gosh, we sounded like typical parents for once. A little taste of normalcy was always nice, except not when reprimanding our snotty teenager who wasn’t really a teenager. Dorian lifted his head to look at each of us, and then let out a grunt and started to turn away.

  Tristan took a step inside the room, right up to Dorian, crossed his arms over his chest, and glared down at our son. Dorian’s eyes grew wide, and then he finally showed some kind of respect . . . and maybe fear, too, as he backed down, dropping his shoulders and his challenging glare.

  “Sorry,” he muttered as he stared at the floor.

  Tristan clamped a hand on Dorian’s shoulder. “Listen to your mother.”

  “Yes, sir. I promise.”

  We stood there in silence for another moment before Tristan and I left him for our own suite. We hadn’t quite reached it at the end of the hall when Dorian’s door slammed shut. I let out a sigh. Whether he stayed with us or went to the Daemoni, I was losing my baby.

  “Good call on pulling the shield off the mansion,” Tristan said as we picked up the few things that had fallen in our suite.

  “If I’d known it would have survived like this, I would have done it much sooner.” I stood on my toes, reaching above my head to rehang the curtain over the door to the balcony. “In fact, we shouldn’t even waste the mages’ energy in keeping it shielded now. What if the Daemoni attack again?”

  “Exactly.” Tristan came up behind me, easily set the curtain rod in its place, and then slid his arms around my waist. “Nobody will allow you to be unshielded.”

  “Or you. You’re just as important as me,” I reminded him.

  “Not quite.”

  “You’re my second.”

  “But I’m replaceable. You are not.”

  I turned in his arms and glared up at him as I lifted my hand to his ear and squeezed it. “Don’t you ever say that again. You most certainly are not replaceable.”

  His eyes tightened as he suppressed a full-out wince. “Maybe not to you, but to the rest of the Amadis, I am.”

  “Don’t underestimate your value, Mr. Knight.” I lifted onto my toes to place my lips only an inch from his. “Without you, I’m useless, and they all know it.”

  He bent down to close that last bit of space and pressed his mouth to mine. The tingle that spread over my skin as our mouths moved together and our tongues met was most welcome, exciting yet calming after this terrible day. His hands caressing my back gave me a feeling of security, and I relaxed into his arms, ignoring the pull on my mind.

  “Alexis!” Vanessa yelled into my head, her persistence breaking through.

  I groaned as Tristan continued kissing me. A little privacy, please?
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  “Um, sorry, but there’s something you need to see on TV.”

  I sighed and pulled away. Again? Can’t it wait?

  “Oh, I’m sure it’ll be on in the morning, but you probably want to know about it now.”

  On our way down. I looked up at Tristan with a frown. “I guess there’s more for us to see on the news.”

  Tristan and I went back downstairs and found everyone in the theater-style seats in the media room, their eyes glued to the multiple screens hanging on the wall. Apparently all but one television had survived the bombing. The TVs showed the same press conference being translated for the stations around the world we were tuned into. The English version’s volume was turned up so we could hear some representative of the United States government who stood behind a pedestal with an American flag on it. Across the bottom of the screen scrolled the words, “Are we on the verge of World War III? Leaders around the world believe so.” The lady on the screen with the salt-and-pepper hair wasn’t the president or vice president or anyone I recognized, but based on the lies she spewed, I’d bet she was Daemoni or in their back pocket. Tristan and I stood behind the occupied chairs and watched.

  “It is true that there have been several airstrikes around the world,” the woman spoke into the microphone as cameras flashed from the press. “These creatures need to be stopped. They have ravaged our streets and killed hundreds of thousands of people in every corner of the globe in less than a day.”

  I bit back a snicker at her choice of words—like globes had corners.

  “They seemed to have been going for the shock factor, and they have definitely shocked us. But we didn’t stand around and wait. We humans will not bow down to these monsters that shouldn’t even exist.” She leaned forward over the pedestal and glared directly into the camera. “We will fight back, and we have already started. As of this morning, we were able to locate the strongholds of the most dangerous faction of these creatures. They claim to be our ally and promise protection, but they are the most vicious of all, preying on the hopes and fears of innocent humans. They inhabit towns in nearly every country, and we struck every cluster we know about, including their main headquarters in the Aegean Sea, off the coast of Greece.”